Video: Viewing files in the comp panel

When you're working in After Effects, it's extraordinarily important to understand how magnification and quality settings affect how you're viewing your image. I was in a situation where I had a client come into my room and look at a graphic and say, omigosh, is that really that jagged? And I said no, and a few keyboard shortcuts later, they were totally relaxed. But, when you're working in After Effects, sometimes you don't have the optimum situation of a huge screen. For example, if we look in the center of our comp panel, I have these jagged edges on my text. Now when I render this out, the edges of the text are going to look beautiful. But, if as you're working, you want to check how that looks, you want to change the magnification.

Delve into the world of motion graphics, keying, and compositing in After Effects CC. In this course, Ian Robinson lays out six foundations for becoming proficient with After Effects, including concepts such as layers, keyframe animation, and working with 3D. To help you get up and running with the program, the course begins with a project-based chapter on creating an animated graphic bumper. Next, explore the role layers play in compositions and find out how to add style to your projects using effects and graphic elements. Last, see how to build 3D objects with CINEMA 4D Lite, as well as stabilize footage, solve for 3D cameras, and paint in graphics with the Reverse Stabilization feature.

Viewing files in the comp panel

When you're working in After Effects, it's extraordinarily important to understandhow magnification and quality settings affect how you're viewing your image.I was in a situation where I had a client come into my room and look at a graphicand say, omigosh, is that really that jagged?And I said no, and a few keyboard shortcuts later, they were totallyrelaxed. But, when you're working in After Effects,sometimes you don't have the optimum situation of a huge screen.For example, if we look in the center of our comp panel, I have these jagged edgeson my text. Now when I render this out, the edges ofthe text are going to look beautiful. But, if as you're working, you want tocheck how that looks, you want to change the magnification.

Now there are a couple ways you can do this in the composition panel.One is by using, I call them the alligator keys, but really, it's the Comma key andthe Period key, just right next to the letter M.So if I hit period, it'll zoom in to 100%, and notice my resolution also changed upto 100%. This automatically updates and changeswith the magnification setting, as long as you have it set to Auto.So I'm going to click on Full and make sure I'm on Auto.Now, even though the edges of this layer look extraordinarily sharp, sometimes youwant to preview the actual alpha channel of the one individual layer.

Now, instead of doing that in a comp window, which I could do by using the solobutton and changing some of the switches, I'm just going to double-click on layertwo, and load it into my Layer panel. And if you look into the lower leftcorner, you'll see this little running man icon and if we click on the leftmost icon,it'll toggle the Alpha channel on or off. Now, you can also use a keyboard commandto switch between the different views. It's Option on the Mac or Alt on the PCand 4, will show your Alpha channel. You could use 3, 2, or 1 to switch betweenthe red, the green, and the blue. And notice as I'm switching, I get thisreally nice blue outline, letting me know exactly what channel I'm looking at.

So using the layer panel comes in extraordinarily handy when you're tryingto view things. But if you notice, I can't see the fullsize of my word. So what I'm going to do is press the Tildekey in the upper left corner of the keyboard.It's just under the Escape key. When you press that, it'll go ahead andmaximize whatever panel you currently have active, so you can take up as much realestate as you like on your computer. Now, I'm going to press the Tilde key onemore time, and just jump back into my composition panel.

In my comp panel here, I could also press the Tilde key to preview this.Now, what if I wanted to preview this entire animation like as it's playing?Well, I could use my Ram preview. In order to do that, while we're at fullscreen, we need to use a keyboard shortcut.So I'm going to press 0 on my keypad. If you're on a laptop, you could pressControl+0. Now, once it's loaded and Ram, it'll goahead and playback in real time. (INAUDIBLE) press the Spacebar to stopplayback. If you want to step through frame byframe, you can use the Page Up and Page Down keys.

Notice as I'm moving Page Up and Page Down, I can clearly see the highlightthat's moving through my Text layers. Now, let's press the Tilde key again justto jump back into the composition panel. Now, what if I want to change themagnification of this view so I can see the entire comp again?Sure, I could go ahead and click on the Magnification button and switch it back tofit up to 100. But there's a keyboard shortcut for that.It's Option on the Mac, Alt on Windows, and then the Forward Slash key, which is,kind of, the Question Mark key. That'll automatically switch your view tofit in whatever size of the interface. Notice as I resize my comp panel, it'sautomatically resizing the view of my graphic.

Now, in the Comp panel, you'd think we were finished with the magnification andresolution settings, but there's one other setting you need to be aware of, and it'sthis button over here in the lower right corner of the comp settings.If I go ahead and click and hold, you can see it's set to Adaptive Resolution.And what that means, as I work inside of After Effects, it will lower theresolution as I'm working to keep playback going as fast as possible.But, again, it lowers the resolution. So, if you're really trying to payattention to what's going on you want to turn off Adaptive Resolution and change itto final quality. When you do final quality and then switchyour magnification back up to 100%, you can preview your comp and make sure thateverything looks all sharp and clean, till the cows come home.

Find answers to the most frequently asked questions about After Effects CC Essential Training .

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Q: This course was updated on 6/18/2014. What changed?

A: We added new movies to the "Fundamentals of After Effects"
chapter, reorganized and re-recorded the "Up and Running" and "Keying
Green Screen Footage" chapters, and added new movies on Color Finesse 3
and masking individual effects.

Q: When I try to open a project file, After Effects tells me I need to update my system, since the file was made with version 13.0. But I already installed the most recent After Effects update. Why can't I open the project?

A: In
the latest round of updates, Adobe chose to create a completely new
installer for this latest version. While you may have updated the version of After Effects CC you have installed (12.x), there is an entirely new
After Effects install for 2014 (13.0). Check for an After Effects CC (2014) item in the Creative Cloud app and download and install it from there.

After you install the new version, you should be able to open 13.0 projects. After Effects CC (2014) will coexist with the older version of After Effects on your machine. If
you currently have any shortcuts on your computer to launch After
Effects, you may have to go back into the Programs folder and create a
new shortcut to the newer version, After Effects 2014.

Q: This course was updated on 11/03/2014. What changed?

A: We updated 25 movies to reflect changes to the Creative Cloud 2014 release of AfterEffects. This includes the new optimized user interface and enhanced Cineware and CINEMA 4D Lite pipeline. The new movies are labeled with the "(CC 2014.1)" tag.

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